Personal mobility vehicles have gained widespread acceptance for use by elderly persons or persons with partial disabilities. Self-propelled scooters are among the most popular personal mobility vehicles. As the use of scooters has increased, so has the need to transport such scooters to remote locations. Many new vehicles such as minivans and SUVs have a rear door opening and the interior size of these vehicles allows transportation of numerous small sized vehicles such as scooters, all terrain vehicles, riding lawn mowers, motorcycles, etc. The loading and transportation of scooters presents numerous problems. Transporting a scooter, which often weighs more than the user, requires its placement inside the storage area of the transport vehicle. Manually lifting a scooter into a transport vehicle is an arduous if not impossible task especially for elderly or partially handicapped persons. To overcome these problems various lift and ramp systems have been designed. Examples of such lifting system include hoists or cranes mounted to a vehicle as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,810,547 issued to Bruno et al. 22 Sep. 1998, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,853,282 issued to Bechler et al. 29 Dec. 1998 and in U.S. Pat. No. 6,547,507 issued to Gest et al. 15 Apr. 2003. Special care has to be taken by the user to properly position and secure the scooter as well as the lift in order to prevent damage to the rear door. Unfortunately, such lift systems require substantial user strength for manually maneuvering the scooter into the proper position within the vehicle. Other examples include ramp systems as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,380,144 issued to smith et al. 10 Jan. 1995, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,616,396 issued to Sternberg 9 Sep. 2003, and in U.S. patent application 2002/0081184 by Sternberg published 27 Jun. 2002. However, loading a scooter using a ramp is also an arduous task. Due to the limited height of the vehicle—minivan or SUV—a user has to bend forward substantially when driving a scooter via the ramp into or out of the vehicle. To overcome this problem Sternberg discloses a ramp having a hoist for pulling the scooter into the vehicle. However, the user is still left with the problem of driving or manually unloading the scooter out of the vehicle onto the ramp. Furthermore, in order to provide a sufficiently small slope ramp systems need a large space behind the vehicle for disposing the ramp and driving the scooter thereon. Another disadvantage of most of these prior art devices are the substantial work and modifications required for installing the same in a vehicle. The above problems are partly overcome by the “4300-BP Backpacker Inside Lift” produced by Scooter Lift Manufacturing. A platform for loading a scooter is vertically lifted by a lift arm and then the lift arm together with the platform is moved horizontally into the vehicle. However, this type of lift has substantial restrictions concerning the size of scooter it is capable to load. Firstly, the lift arm in the center requires a substantial amount of the space in the rear of the vehicle such that the scooter is oriented across the driving direction of the vehicle in order to be able to accommodate the lift arm as well as the scooter. Thus, the width of the vehicle puts a severe restriction onto the length of the scooter. Secondly, translationally moving the lift arm requires a drive mechanism strong enough to support the moments induced when the lift arm is used for lifting the platform with the scooter. Thus, the dimension of the drive mechanism substantially raises the height of the platform above the vehicle floor necessitating the backrest of the scooter to be collapsed.
In light of the prior art it would be highly advantageous to provide an inside vehicle lift that overcomes the drawbacks of the prior art by maximizing the space provided for the load in the rear of the vehicle, being easily operated, and being easily installed without substantial modifications to the vehicle.